We are busy with preparations underway for our exhibit at this years Web Summit in Lisbon, and have now been assigned our day and booth location. Auto Repair Bill will be exhibiting at Booth A347 of the Software Conference on Day 2, Wednesday 8th November, at the MEO Arena in Lisbon.

Be sure to stop by and visit us! We will be in Lisbon from 3rd Nov – 11 Nov, please feel free to drop an email or tweet if you wish to arrange a meetup. Look forward to seeing everyone there!

As we get excited for our trip to exhibit as an Alpha Startup in Lisbon for this years Web Summit, we got a glimpse of what to expect and what to do at the Runway to Web Summit event in Dublin on thursday night at Dogpatch Labs, with both interesting and very funny talks. There was a good representation of startups here as to be expected. Although judging by a show of hands not many appeared, or admitted to having the runway to get to Lisbon, so it is hard to know who we may see again when we arrive in Lisbon! The talks were very casual and Irish, with crazy anecdotes about bathrooms and buying used underwear, with a good deal of swearing thrown just for good measure and added liveliness to the room certainly!

Spark of Genius Panel

On a more serious note the panels were interesting and insightful with the benefit of both hindsight and foresight from those who had been through the mill, and survived. Sponsored by ESB Spark of Genius, a panel of three recent finalists and winners from Spark of Genius gave their insights to approaching the scale of an event like the Web Summit and how they made it work for them. It seems the most important take away here was to not make an appointment with an investor before 2pm due to the Night Summit after parties which are both legendary and brutal for an early morning.

Paddy Cosgrave (Founder of Web Summit) and Eamon Leonard (Cohort) had an entertaining mix of story telling, advice for the summit, anecdotes about the Web Summit first office and having to use the toilet in the Italian restaurant up the road, from little things, big things grow. Of course they poked fun at the infamous wifi incident in Dublin a few years ago, but I’m sure everything will run smoothly in Lisbon!

Auto Repair Bill will be exhibited at this years Web Summit in Lisbon, November 6-9, 2017.

We are excited to meet others in the AutoTech and SaaS business, it promises to be an interested event in a beautiful city. Anyone who would like to book a time to speak with our team our CEO is welcome to do so by contacting us through our website and we will see you there!

We will post more details such as our booth location once it has been assigned to us. Updates will be posted here and on our social media channels.

Thank you all for your patience while the post production bugs were ironed out of our recent upgrade, and for all the reports that helped us find and fix everything quickly! We are aware of a few minor niggles still remaining from the transition of some user accounts to the new system, if you have trouble with the switchover, please contact customer service.

We have compiled all the recent customer requests for updates and many of you will see more of what you have been asking for in the coming months, we will have more news on what is coming next shortly as we decide on our delivery schedule for future updates.

As you were likely aware we have been working on a new release for some time now, delivering a raft of new features, product improvements and important bug fixes.

The most anticipated new feature will of course be our new itemized labor entry for invoices and estimates. With this will also come much better document handling and conversion between documents, it is now much easier to convert a repair order to invoice, or an estimate to an invoice.

The overall responsiveness and reliability of the editor has been improved too, fixing many long standing issues such as losing filled in data when changing client or navigating away from the page accidentally.

Existing features to save time such as the QUIK Service and Preset templates have been seamlessy integrated to the new invoice system, you can still use your old presets that you have saved, it will automagically take you back to the classic editor, and you can of course you start creating Presets to use with the new editor too.

The QUIK Service feature is now a lot more useful and powerful when using the new invoice editor, giving proper detailed job breakdown on both time, labor cost and parts.

There is now also support for multiple labor rates on invoices, repair orders and estimates, you can set up to three rates in settings, but can override when required too.

There are now also a list of online parts ordering services, which will easily bring you conveniently to the ordering service from within the app.

There are now many more settings available to customize the software and invoices to your needs, most notable is the support for multiple labor rates.

Please take a moment to visit Settings and adjust the new system to make it function in the way most comfortable for you and your business.

Hi folks, there will be intermittent periods of downtime while we carry out our upgrade on our production servers, we anticipate disruption to be minimal, but if you do experience any minor issues, please wait, and try again later. If you experience any serious issues then please contact customer support for assistance.

There is no doubt that the most requested feature we see is the ability to itemize labor in a fashion similar to how our parts handling works. We have been busily implementing the required background work necessary to preserve your existing data in its current format.

The new editor will feature intelligent, learning auto-completion similar to the parts items. Many other new features are being introduced, such as multiple labor rates, e.g. if you have a commercial rate and consumer rate, or simply work near the border of two municipalities.

There have been a few delays rolling this out, as it needs to be rigorously tested to ensure it integrates fully both with our own internal systems, and with third party providers such as CarFax and QuickBooks.

One thing we wish to avoid is making the editor too complex, but I think you will be happy with the new invoices produced!

We can’t say for sure when this will be fully rolled out, but it is slated for the end of July, watch this space.

We are happy to introduce more improvements and refinements to our Inventory management. As always, you could add your own vendors and use the automatically created inventory from the parts you use on your invoices, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple one click access to the most popular online sales vendors to directly order the parts you need too? Of course it would!

Now when you go to add a part in the Inventory, you will be presented with a list of nearly a dozen reputable online trade parts stores for easy re-ordering. It is worth noting placing an order on these sites will not update your Auto Repair Bill inventory, as these sites do not offer the integration options to third party apps, we are talking to Worldpac however to see if we can integrate with them.

The full list of currently supported external suppliers are as follow:

We have added several new features to our Android app, the licence plate scanner with Carfax integration has finally been released and is quite cool folks!

We have added a lot of useful features in Work Order management. You can now add photos to a work order directly from the app and view and manage on web app. The tick icon will bring up the signature screen for the customer to sign, and the new camera icon allows you to take pictures and upload for use in the web app.

Work orders can now also be digitally signed by customers, they can sign on-screen, and the signature will be placed on the work order PDF, to either digitally store, or to print for record keeping. Aside from convenience, this can also help your company to reduce their carbon footprint and save on printing, paper and storage costs.

We have a redesign in the works to modernize the look of our app and we are considering a port for iOS later this year.

A small number of our users have had some quirky experiences with our PayPal subscription system over the past few months, this was partly a fault on PayPal’s end, and partly a fault on our backend systems communicating with PayPal. It had been a thorny prickle in our back end for some time, dealing with PayPal limitations and adjusting our own backend.

The problem stemmed from customers missing a payment on their renewal date; PayPal would attempt a re-charge 5 days later, however the failed payment triggered our systems to deactivate account upon failed payment, this led to some users unwittingly and quite understandably selecting a new plan by accident to reactivate, as you can imagine this setup caused a lot of confusion and we issued refunds or special deals to all affected customers. We sincerely apologize to our affected customers are grateful of their continued custom, feedback and support of Auto Repair Bill.

Our new system will now allow you a grace period to keep using your account until the final PayPal payment attempt, depending on your PayPal account and how long you have it, the type of account, etc, determine how many retires are made, the maximum is 3 attempts, 5 days apart, now your account will only be deactivated if you miss the third payment.

Please note we have also introduced flagging of accounts that may attempt to abuse this generosity on late payments. As we grow, we can afford this to facilitate our loyal customers, everyone has a slow month every now and then and we appreciate that, and our software motto is to make your day to day business easier to manage!